Entertainment Lawyers

  Will the UK Government allow Channel 4 to become privatized? If their current plan is anything to go by, it appears so. The home of iconic British hits like It’s a Sin and The Great British Bake Off , it seems an arbitrary way to treat a treasured piece of the UK TV industry, yet ambiguous mutterings from Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden about ‘alternative ownership models’ are ominous indeed. BLAKE & WANG P.A entertainment law firms Los Angeles investigates. The UK has a firmly established culture of government-owned TV stations, and Channel 4 has been the iconic face of this since 1982. Yet it’s also a self-sufficient entity, taking no public funds and instead of plowing profit back to the UK independent production sector to help facilitate public service content with actual innovation. Would privatization further that, or, as many fear, drag it down instead? Why is the government even keen on this notion? The official explanation is fears around sustainability, given it re...

The recent introduction of the Nielsen ‘The Gauge’, to provide more accurate monthly figures on viewing, has finally given studios and marketers what they want- a real picture of the state of audience numbers across linear and streaming channels. What it has revealed, however, is slightly unexpected. Where to now for interested advertisers? BLAKE & WANG P.A Entertainment Attorney look into it.  Brandon Blake - Managing partner at Blake & Wang P.A The complaints that Nielsen’s traditional methodology don’t match the streaming era have been heavy. Without a proper knowledge of how streaming sits in comparison to linear TV, making smart advertising decisions is near impossible. And with so many streams turning to ad-supported tiers, the lack has been devastating. Finally, we’ve seen Nielsen update its strategies, no doubt in response to the push to direct-to-consumer tactics from major studios.  The results were surprising. The...

  This week we have seen union negotiations between IATSE and AMPTP fall sour and get put on ice until July 6th. It’s a disappointing development for ‘easy’ negotiations that were originally predicted to take only 2 weeks from their May 17th opening talks. BLAKE & WANG P.A Entertainment Lawyer looks into the matter in more depth.                                               Brandon Blake - Entertainment Lawyer Overall, the issue seems to lie in an inability to marry stances on several core issues, which does not bode very well for future talks, either, unless some revised proposal can make new middle ground. So far, we know that funding sources for the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan have become a sticking point, with employers wanting more worker funding and the union wishing to see greater share from streaming revenue and other sources.  ...

                                        Brandon Blake - Managing Partner at Blake & Wang P.A With WarnerMedia announcing the reduced-cost, ad-supported tier for HBO Max rolling out this week, what does this mean for the future of streamers? BLAKE & WANG P.A one of the best entertainment lawyers in Los Angeles looks at the new model- and how it’s not so new after all. We’ve seen many streamers- exactly like HBO Max- introduce an ad-supported tier after garnering their initial support through subscription only. We’ve also seen services like Hulu and CBS All Access started as ad-supported, and evolve to a full subscription, non-ad tier service later down the line. While Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Disney+ have (to date) held to only a subscription tier, many other smaller-scale streamers are opting to allow consumers the choice. The notion of mining both a subscription a...

                                      Managing Partner at Blake & Wang P.A- Brandon Blake With 60 million new subscribers to Disney + in the streaming service’s first year, it’s unsurprising that the overall Disney Giant has sat up and started to pay attention. Even so, the staggering nature of their entire corporate overhaul around streaming and direct-to-consumer is hard to grasp unless you’ve been paying full attention. BLAKE & WANG P.A entertainment lawyer Los Angeles highlights some key aspects you should know around this bold move. We’ve looked at the nitty-gritty of the restructure in detail elsewhere. In effect, while their live entertainment arm (covering the parks and experiences) sees little restructuring, the newly created ‘Media and Entertainment Distribution Group’ we saw created last fall pulled many older content distribution arms into one sleeker, more targeted operat...